When WIS's server seizes up for hours on end, as it is right now (at least in Roy Hobbs World), would it be too much of an ordeal for a WIS customer service representative to get in this forum and give the customers some information about the length of downtown?

In fairness to HBD development and support people, they might not have even known there was a problem until they got into work this morning and somebody from IT told them, "Hey, a server went down last night and I think it was one of yours". That sucks, but it's often the way things go in the tech world.

Yes, it's probably correct that WIS is not a "monitor the website 24/7 business." We've learned that through experience. My point, I think, in starting this thread was not that WIS should be a 24/7 site but that they should be more communicative with their customers. I think most of us can agree that WIS's customer service is not their strongest point. Making it better should not be real difficult. The shutdown notice they finally issued at 9:23AM today is an example of good customer relations; a simple declarative statement that they've got a problem, are working on it, and an estimate of how much longer the downtime will last. WIS's customer relations problem lies, in my view, with the fact that these sorts of statements almost always come too late, after hours and hours of silence, amid the growing frustration of many customers. Such WIS statements always appear reactive rather than proactive, appear defensive after the long silences and, therefore, just add to customer annoyance. Surely it would not be too expensive or too difficult for WIS to put into place some sort of an alarm device that would sound a notification alarm upon hardware/server failure? It is my understanding that many small, non-24/7 businesses do subscribe to such devices. Such an alarm would enable WIS to timely post a generic "We're aware of the problem, we'll get on it first thing in the morning" message in the forum. Seems to me that such a basic sensitivity to customer notification would go a long way toward improving customer satisifaction.

Posted by tomfool on 5/15/2013 10:58:00 AM (view original):Yes, it's probably correct that WIS is not a "monitor the website 24/7 business." We've learned that through experience. My point, I think, in starting this thread was not that WIS should be a 24/7 site but that they should be more communicative with their customers. I think most of us can agree that WIS's customer service is not their strongest point. Making it better should not be real difficult. The shutdown notice they finally issued at 9:23AM today is an example of good customer relations; a simple declarative statement that they've got a problem, are working on it, and an estimate of how much longer the downtime will last. WIS's customer relations problem lies, in my view, with the fact that these sorts of statements almost always come too late, after hours and hours of silence, amid the growing frustration of many customers. Such WIS statements always appear reactive rather than proactive, appear defensive after the long silences and, therefore, just add to customer annoyance. Surely it would not be too expensive or too difficult for WIS to put into place some sort of an alarm device that would sound a notification alarm upon hardware/server failure? It is my understanding that many small, non-24/7 businesses do subscribe to such devices. Such an alarm would enable WIS to timely post a generic "We're aware of the problem, we'll get on it first thing in the morning" message in the forum. Seems to me that such a basic sensitivity to customer notification would go a long way toward improving customer satisifaction.

They posted things about the issues that occured yesterday and posted additional information this morning. As of now their only problem appears to be people like you that are freaking out over nothing.

Perhaps their hours are 9-5 or 9-6. That would make the notice 23 minutes after arriving. That seems like a respectable response time to assess and reply. You don't want to say "We have problem and it will be resolved in 15 minutes" after 3 minutes if you don't even know what it is yet.

Maybe an "on-call" alarm would work. But would someone rush to the office at 2:23 AM to attempt to resolve the problem? Because I know a "We have a problem. We'll work on it when we return to the office" post would NOT go over well.

Well, I don't know about embarrassing the entire human race. Maybe just lacking a little perspective. We'd all like to think someone is sitting in front of his monitoring system making sure all is well on the HBD sim front. But I think most of us know that isn't even remotely the reality. We pay them about a quarter a day for each team to let us play a game. 99.998% of the time, everything goes as planned. It's just silly to expect someone to monitor the situation around the clock for that .002% when it doesn't. It's simply not cost-effective.